Tagged linode

[simage=127,288,y,left,]Speed: sweet, glorious speed. That’s what you should find as you visit this site in the future, now that everything’s been moved over to a Linode Virtual Private Server. After checking out a colleague’s site that loads pretty much instantly, despite being a similar WordPress blog, I decided to sign on with Linode and dump my current Dreamhost shared hosting. At the same time, I followed the same colleague’s suggestion to switch my web server from Apache to nginx. If you’re not familiar with nginx, and you’re hosting a site on which you control the web server, nginx is definitely worth a look as an alternative to Apache, since it’s lighter and faster (also, it seems that the program’s author is willing to work with users to improve functionality).

I was pretty happy with my Dreamhost shared hosting for a while, but this site has outgrown the limited resources that I had, and furthermore the actual physical host that Dreamhost had me on was getting quite old (and full o’ data). I tried a Dreamhost PS for the last week, and while it seems to be decently fast (although the preview PS has 2+GB of RAM), I’m a little ticked off by the pricing. When I was looking at the PS, it was listed as $15 a month for 300MB of RAM (not a bad deal). Once I signed up for the trial, however, the total cost was revealed as $15 plus the shared hosting fee I already pay ($10.95 a month). That brought the total to about $26 a month, a lot more than the $20 a month for the Linode VPS with 360MB of RAM. All in all, the last 4-5 hours of moving my sites over has been worth it, and Linode has been tip-top so far. I’ll post more on them as I continue to use their hosting, and post some articles about the configuration I’m running on the VPS.